Rydberg atoms, which are atoms in a highly excited state, have several unique and advantageous properties, including a particularly long lifetime and large sensitivities to external fields. These properties make them valuable for a variety of applications, for instance for the development of quantum technologies.

For years, scientists have looked for ways to cool molecules down to ultracold temperatures, at which point the molecules should slow to a crawl, allowing scientists to precisely control their quantum behavior. This could enable researchers to use molecules as complex bits for quantum computing, tuning individual molecules like tiny knobs to carry out multiple streams of calculations at a time.

Traffic jams may have disappeared from our roads as people stay home during the COVID-19 pandemic, but we can be confident they will be back. Scientists have studied traffic and congestion for decades.

Emitting light from silicon has been the Holy Grail in the microelectronics industry for decades. Solving this puzzle would revolutionize computing, as chips will become faster than ever. Researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology have now developed an alloy with silicon that can emit light. The results have been published in the journal Nature. The team will now develop a silicon laser to be integrated into current chips.

Astronomers have assumed for decades that the Universe is expanding at the same rate in all directions. A new study based on data from ESA's XMM-Newton, NASA's Chandra and the German-led ROSAT X-ray observatories suggests this key premise of cosmology might be wrong.

You may have heard that nothing escapes the gravitational grasp of a black hole, not even light. This is true in the immediate vicinity of a black hole, but a bit farther out—in disks of material that swirl around some black holes—light can escape. In fact, this is the reason actively growing black holes shine with brilliant X-rays.

From a massive disk of gas and dust rotating around the sun, the earth and the other seven planets of our solar system once developed alongside their moons. And the same must have happened, scientists believe, for the thousands of extrasolar planets discovered in recent decades. To gain more insight, astrophysicists use computer simulations to investigate the processes at work as planets form from such protoplanetary disks, such as the growth of a planet's mass as well as the formation of its magnetic field. Up until very recently, these two processes—planet development and magnetic field formation—have been separate fields of research and simulated in separate models. But now, Lucio Mayer, Professor of Computational Astrophysics at the University of Zurich and Project Manager at the National Centre of Competence in Research Planets, along with his colleagues Hongping Deng, former Ph.D. student of Mayer, and Henrik Latter, University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, have successfully combined both processes into one simulation for the first time. The results have now been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

On March 9, 2020, a Dragon cargo spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station carrying dozens of scientific experiments as a part of SpaceX's 20th cargo resupply mission. Now, Dragon heads home. On April 7, it is scheduled to undock from station, bringing samples, hardware and data from completed investigations back to Earth on its return trip.

In 2016, China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope—the largest single-aperture radio telescope in the world—gathered its first light. Since then, the telescope has undergone extensive testing and commissioning and officially went online in Jan of 2020. In all that time, it has also been responsible for multiple discoveries, including close to 100 new pulsars.

An international research team led by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Turku, Finland, mapped the interstellar magnetic field structure and interstellar matter distribution in the solar neighbourhood. The results of the study have been published in the esteemed European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics in March.

Many processes that generate electricity also produce heat, a potent energy resource that often goes untapped everywhere from factories to vehicles to power plants. An innovative system currently being developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory can quickly store heat and release it for use when needed, surpassing conventional storage options in both flexibility and efficiency.

South Korea's flag carrier Korean Air will put 70 percent of its 19,000 staff on furlough, it said, as it scrambles to cope with the coronavirus pandemic that has brought global aviation to a standstill.

School of Technology professor Amanda Hughes has spent her career studying social media during disasters and crises. Her work looks at how members of the public turn to social media during a crisis and how they find trustworthy information.

Falsehoods, rumors and conspiracy theories thrive during a crisis, and even more when the crisis revolves around a threatening disease. The combination of these two factors in a digital age is a dangerous cocktail, says a Malmö University researcher.

The vision to create sustainable urban spaces is becoming a reality in several European cities, including Rotterdam, Umea and Glasgow. Thanks to the EU-funded Ruggedised project, Rotterdam is developing and implementing various smart solutions. One such solution is a thermal grid connecting various large buildings in the city to optimize the distribution of heat and cold among buildings, smart charging parking lots, large-scale deployment of zero-emission e-buses, and efficient and intelligent street lighting.

Surface electromyography (sEMG) is a non-invasive, computer-based technique that can record electrical impulses. The present pattern-recognition-based control strategy can realize some myoelectric control, but it is not as smooth as a human hand.

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